Monica Alexrad: Author-centered approach to Interactive Drama

Monica begins by discussing the famous interactive drama Façade. Façade is a great example of the medium, but it's not very easy to take the same software that was used to create it and use it to tell a different story. Monica is interested in taking the tools that are used to create interactive drama and 'put the author first'. Her paper is conceptual - she is exploring a possible design for a tool that will allow authors to write their own interactive dramas, and to define the animations that the characters will use.

Such a system would require several key features:

• A modular approach that would separate the authoring tools from the underlying tools, giving the author freedom from the complicated programming tasks that they are unlikely to be skilled in.
• The tool would have to be highly stable.
• Animation is a crucial part of interactive drama, yet it's a bottleneck in development, as writers have to wait on artists and programmers. This tool would get around this problem by encompassing an animation system which would be greatly simplified and not focused on realism, yet which would still create highly expressive animations.

To justify the focus on expressiveness over realism, Monica notes how successful the cartoonish FearNot! characters are, as well as playing the famous Pixar lamp video. The lamps are obviously not realistic representations of people, yet they are clearly expressive.

She demonstrates a screenshot of their suggested graphics system - two characters, each made up of a single coloured polygon with two black circles for eyes. They will have very simple animations that are already linked with emotions. This will foster the creativity of the author, because they can experiment with their ideas and get immediate feedback, rather than waiting for complex art resources to be created. They could also easily prototype their ideas for demonstration.

From a technical point of view, the tool would act like a debugger - i.e. you could immediately run whatever was ready, and monitor what's going on behind the scenes. You would also have the ability to modify the program while staying in run-time mode.

Question and answers session:

Michael Kriegel wonders why not simply use a text interface, given how difficult the 3D animation side of things is. Monica explains that animating the story is important for conveying the story emotionally.